UAMS Celebrates King’s Legacy

By Spencer Watson

 
Carmelita Smith (left), manager for diversity in the UAMS Center for Diversity Affairs, shows members of the Parkview High School Madrigals, a poster for the Generational Diversity Month events at UAMS that included their performance at the Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration.

January 30, 2015 | In its commemoration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., UAMS looked to the performing talents of high school students and the words and remembrances of several employees to help honor and celebrate the civil rights leader.

Setting the tone for the annual event, a culmination of January events around the theme of Generational Diversity sponsored by the Chancellor’s Diversity Committee of the UAMS Center for Diversity Affairs, was a video featuring UAMS employees talking about King and how his “dream” impacted them through their life and career. (Click here to watch the video)

Susan Leon, executive associate dean for finance and administration in the College of Medicine, talked of how she and some other white students in the band at her high school asked the director to stop having the band play “Dixie” at events. He refused, she said, so the frustrated students went and gathered the sheet music for the 19thCentury tune, which has been seen by some as an offensive anthem tied to racial separation, and burned it.

“We got in trouble,” Leon said, but added the song was not played anymore during her time at the school.

Venusa Phomakay, a medical student, noted that her parents came to the United States from Laos, a southeast Asian country where there was political unrest and a lack of equal rights. “My parents came from Laos for the exact thing King was fighting for — equal rights and justice,” she said.

Medical student Hamza Arshad spoke of being a graduating senior at Central High School in 2007 when the 50th anniversary of that school’s integration was celebrated. He said he was moved and inspired by getting to meet members of the Little Rock Nine.

Highlighting the event was participation by students from two Little Rock high schools. Presenting the flags to start the ceremony was the Parkview  Arts/Science Magnet High School Naval Junior ROTC, which was backed by the school’s Madrigals who performed the national anthem, then a rousing rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Four students from LR Central High School Drama Department performed a stirring spoken word and musical tribute that included passages from King’s speeches and the first verse to “America.”

Keynote speaker Michael Nellums, Ed.D., principal of Pine Bluff High School, opened his remarks remembering that he was a first grader at an all-black school in England, Ark., in 1968 when he heard King had been killed. He later talked of being the target of racial slurs when he first walked onto the playground at an integrated school.

Nellums then focused on how the older generations have a responsibility to today’s youth to ensure King’s struggles for equality and justice for all endure.

He challenged parents and adults to emphasize education and literacy with the youth as well as being “socially, politically and especially financially literate” along with sending the message that “violence is the language of the inarticulate.”

Encourage students to lose the term “I can’t” and to not “let doubt control the possibilities and potential they have in their lives,” Nellums said.

“Today is about hopes, opportunity and promise — it’s not as important what I see in you but what you see in yourselves,” he said, adding later that “King’s Dream is not a revelation but a continuation of what you must continue to do every day.”